Aron Ralston should go down in history as one of the hardest motherfuckers to ever live, despite the fact that he was a mechanical engineer and a French major in college. The type of badassery and self-sacrifice he demonstrated on a fateful week in May of 2003 is something that was otherwise unheard of in anything outside of an implausible action movie, an ancient Greek myth or a National Geographic documentary on wolverines.

Ralston was canyoneering in the Blue John Canyon in Utah when all of a sudden there was a shifting of rocks and a giant boulder fell onto his right forearm, pinning it against the canyon wall and trapping him. Ralston stayed cool and just waited for help to arrive. However, after a couple of days nobody had come by and he had exhausted his water supply. Instead of being a chump-ass bitch and dying of exposure and dehydration, Aron Ralston got totally fucking hardcore and freed himself the only way that he could: By whipping out his fucking dull pocketknife and using it to sever his own arm. Yeah. He had a crappy multitool that he received free with the purchase of a crappy id="mce_marker"5 flashlight and used it to hack and saw his damn arm off to extricate himself from the boulder. Shit, I had a tough time looking at my knee without the bandage for the first time after I had surgery; I can't imagine being able to actually chop off my arm without passing out from pain or blood loss or not being insane or something. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures, but even so, I'd be willing to bet that few people in the world would have the stones to do what Aron Ralston did.